Oral History with Annemarie and Waldtraut Kusserow

Annemarie and Waldtraut Kusserow were Jehovah’s Witnesses who lived with their parents and nine siblings in the town of Bad Lippspringe in Germany. The Kusserows' family home became a center of Jehovah’s Witness activities before the Nazi rise to power in 1933. The featured oral history with the sisters discusses how their entire family was persecuted under Nazi rule.

The Nazi regime viewed Jehovah’s Witnesses as a threat to the unity of the so-called “national community” and began targeting Jehovah’s Witnesses and other so-called “enemies of the state.” Jehovah’s Witnesses were devout pacifists who often refused to say “heil Hitler,” perform the Nazi salute, or display the Nazi swastika flag.¹ The German government banned Jehovah’s Witnesses from meeting, preaching, or distributing their publications. Many Jehovah’s Witnesses were arrested and imprisoned in jails, prisons, and concentration camps.²

Members of the Kusserow family experienced different forms of persecution under Nazi rule.³ The Gestapo searched the Kusserows’ home nearly 20 times looking for banned publications, but the family successfully hid these behind a false wall. Authorities repeatedly arrested Annemarie’s and Waldtraut’s parents beginning in the mid-1930s. Their father Franz was sentenced to prison, and their mother Hilda was eventually sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp. German police came to their home and their school and removed the three youngest children from their parents’ custody.⁴

The older Kusserow children were arrested one at a time and jailed in prisons or concentration camps. Annemarie and Waldtraut had moved to Berlin to find work, but Waldtraut returned to Bad Lippspringe to help manage the family’s affairs when the rest of the family was arrested. She was also arrested and imprisoned for the next two and a half years.

In the featured clip, the sisters discuss Waldtraut’s experience and the deaths of three of their brothers. They tell the story together, often checking with one another for details or English words as they recall their persecution. Their brothers Wilhelm and Wolfgang were each executed for refusing to serve in the German military.⁵ Wilhelm was 25 years old when he was shot by a firing squad in Münster, Germany in April 1940. Wolfgang was barely 20 years old when he was beheaded in March 1942. Their brother Karl-Heinz survived the war but died in 1946 from tuberculosis that he had developed during his years imprisoned in Dachau concentration camp.

The surviving members of the Kusserow family reunited after the end of the war. Authorities had seized their home and given it to a family deemed loyal to the Nazi regime, but they never discovered the banned Jehovah’s Witness reading materials that the Kusserows had hidden there.⁶

Jehovah’s Witnesses in Germany claimed to be a politically neutral religious group and generally did not vote or participate in rituals of national loyalty of any kind. This was also true in the United States and Canada. To learn more, see Robert L. Tsai, Eloquence and Reason: Creating a First Amendment Culture (Yale University Press, 2008); Merlin Owen Newton, Armed with the Constitution: Jehovah's Witnesses in Alabama and the U.S. Supreme Court, 1939-1946 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995); and M. James Penton, Jehovah's Witnesses and the Third Reich: Sectarian Politics under Persecution (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 120-130.

Scholars estimate that roughly 10,000 Jehovah’s Witnesses were imprisoned during Nazi rule. Of these, about 2,000 German Witnesses were sent to concentration camps along with roughly 1,000 non-German Witnesses. To learn more, see Detlef Garbe, Between Resistance & Martyrdom: Jehovah’s Witnesses in the Third Reich, translated by Dagmar G. Grimm (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2008), 481, 484. See also the related items in Experiencing History Punishment Card of Johann Ludwig Rachuba and Letter from J. L. Published in the Golden Age.

Their brother Sigfried died in a swimming accident in the late 1930s, but all of the other children were either removed from their parents' custody or were sent to prisons or concentration camps. Both parents were jailed as well.

One of the children later remembered that this event was so traumatic that he vomited on the uniform of one of the police officers. For another primary source related to legal challenges to the parental rights of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Nazi Germany, see the related Experiencing History item, Decision in the Case of Franz Josef Seitz.

Roughly 250 Jehovah's Witnesses were executed during the years of Nazi rule. Most of these were men who refused to serve in the military, but some were women who were accused of undermining the German war effort. Executions of conscientious objectors were not evenly applied, and condemned men were sometimes able to save their lives by agreeing to serve. To learn more, see Detlef Garbe, Between Resistance & Martyrdom: Jehovah’s Witnesses in the Third Reich, 484.

The Kusserows were able to recover their hidden Jehovah’s Witness publications after the end of the war. To learn more about the Kusserow family, see Purple Triangles: The True Story of a German Family, directed by Martin Smith (Brooklyn, NY: Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York, 1991)

ANNEMARIE: I was also in a penitentiary, and she was in a prison, and my time was not yet over, but my sisters and brothers were in the concentration camp in Ravensbrück, in Sachsenhausen, and in the concentration camp Dachau. And my brother, for instance, was very bad tortured, ill treated.

QUESTION: Now, which brother was that?

ANNEMARIE: This was Karl, Karl-Heinz.

QUESTION: And how old was he? ANNEMARIE: He was -- when he came back, he was 28 years old. And when he came in, he was 23 years old, when he came into the concentration camp Sachsenhausen. And he died of the consequences of his ill treatment in 1946. He was five years in concentration camps, different.

QUESTION: Did he die in the camp?

ANNEMARIE: No, he came back, and he was accompanied by a Norwegian nurse. And the Americans liked to treat him, because he was so ill. And he had TB, tuberculosis. Yeah, but he wanted to see again his parents and sisters and brothers who still live, and so they gave him that nurse to accompany him. And he came back in 1945 and was in our family, sometimes in the hospital in Lippspringe, and he -- yeah, my sister Waldtraut was with him, and he died one and a half years after liberation in 1946.

QUESTION: How many of your family members died in the camps or in prison?

ANNEMARIE: My brother Wilhelm was killed, and my brother Wolfgang was beheaded in Brandenburg. These were two.

QUESTION: What was the occasion, or what was the reason, for his being beheaded?

ANNEMARIE: Yeah, because the reason was because my brother refused to fight against other Christians in other lands, and because he was convinced that the Bible is the truth. And he stick to the Bible and could defend himself why he refused, why he would refuse the military service. And so he was beheaded, that he was condemned to death, and I have letters as a defense of -- handwriting letter, six or, yeah, more than six pages. It was defense.

QUESTION: Did any of your sisters die in the camps?

WALDTRAUT: No.

ANNEMARIE: No, not in the camps. No.

All 11 Items in the Jehovah's Witnesses in Nazi Germany Collection

Archival Information for This Item

Source (Credit)

US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Watch Tower Society

RG Number

50.028.0029

Accession Number

1992.A.0124.29

Date of Interview

October 18, 1988

Duration

00:03:34

Time Selection

11:55—15:29

Interviewee

Annemarie Kusserow

Waldtraut Kusserow

Language(s)

English

German

Reference Location

Bad Lippspringe, Germany

Interview Type

Oral History

How to Cite Museum Materials

Experiencing History Holocaust Sources in Context

Jehovah's Witnesses in Nazi Germany